That Old Objective Correlative

“Technically this is well executed but the subject isn’t very interesting to me.” - Barry J.

“Don’t you have more important things to photograph?” - DominiqueS.

B.J. and D.S. bring up a point I’ve addressed above: photography’s delicious confusion of a thing and its image. Since photographic images are, I dunno, photographic, and since the eye, being an extension of the brain, is easily fooled, it’s tempting to think you’re looking at a face or a figure when what you’re looking at is ink sprayed on paper, electrons shot from guns, or elemental silver. That’s why porn sells. I buy it myself.

But (and this is the special glory of photography) it would be quixotic to throw away the advantage this confusion gives us. Photographers can use the responses burned into a viewer’s firmware to leverage the effect of their photos. They can do it trivially, by photographing something pretty or something scary or something weepy, or they can do it more subtly. With a few obvious lapses I try to be subtle. Better an evocation that leaves viewers moved without knowing why than a trivial stimulus-response package - the latter putting the artist in the same class as a chess player who wins by blowing cigar smoke at his opponent or an actor who moves you to tears by wringing your kitten’s neck.